Panel 4
Boats and/as anti-imperial struggles
Friday 7 May 2021
2:10 - 3:10 pm (PDT)
Panel Speakers:
Bhavani Raman
Kris Alexanderson
Joy Damousi, Anh Nguyen Austen & Mary Tomsic
Moderated by J.P. Catungal
Small Boats and Littoral Histories
Bhavani Raman
What meanings of the littoral are disclosed by studying the small boat? In the wake of the oceanic turn in history, cultural and legal studies, my paper will take up a few boat-histories from the Coromandel coast (especially around the colonial city of Madras, India) from the 18th and 19th centuries. Through this ‘small’ object of seafaring culled from colonial and Tamil language materials, I delineate the intermediate scale of the littoral which intersected with but also existed as a counterpoint to the legal orders of international law from the 16th and 17th century. The Indian ocean dhow has enjoyed scholarly attention as a vehicle of vernacular capital and seafaring ‘across water’ and as an object of contention in international law.
Using the medium of boats other the dhow, I will explore the material, navigational, and legal conventions of coastal and archipelago seafaring that traversed the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. I am interested in how the small boat as an object facilitated the cross pollination of maritime and littoral knowledge between linguistic spheres, and across littoral landscapes and inter-marine regions. Small boats remained essential to imperial coastal infrastructure. In short, small boats and crafts offer a way to recuperate the intermediate geography of the littoral upon which we might resituate the social histories of fishers and the ‘country trade’ in salt, slaves and fish and offer insights into how maritime spaces were internationalized.
Dismantling Imperialism at Sea:
Colonial Collapse Through an Oceanic Lens
Kris Alexanderson
Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, the maritime world was an active political arena fundamental to the functioning of modern imperialism, anticolonialism, and decolonization. An exponential growth in the global circulation of maritime passengers, laborers, religious pilgrims, and other migrants during this period helped facilitate a worldwide proliferation of anticolonial ideologies and political movements. Clandestine flows of activists, propaganda, and weapons thrived in the holds of ships and along the quays of global port cities.
To undermine these subversive currents, colonial governments collaborated with national shipping lines to create extensive maritime policing and surveillance networks. However, these attempts to maintain hegemonic control—not only in the metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between—proved futile as oceans increasingly destabilized modern empires. Ultimately, the maritime world created new opportunities for those living under systems of oppression to critique and negotiate colonized epistomologies of political power, cultural authority, and economic strength.
Ocean as archive: Oral histories and numerical modelling of one Vietnamese refugee boat journey
Joy Damousi
Anh Nguyen Austen &
Mary Tomsic
A collaboration between historians and ocean engineers has provided the opportunity to research refugee boat journeys, and in doing so, we position the ocean as an archival space. While our research methodologies are part of existing fields of scholarship, we bring together distinct disciplinary knowledges and approaches to develop an archive and repository of understanding where the ocean can be positioned as a site of inquiry as well as an actor in this history.
We have begun our research by focusing on a specific refugee boat journey in 1982 that we have oral histories about, as well as written and visual sources. In this symposium paper, we will present the details of the refugee boat journey, the results of the engineering analysis. From this interdisciplinary analysis, we can see the paradoxical position where the ocean created both conditions of severe danger as well as saviour through facilitating a humanitarian rescue.
Professor Joy Damousi, Dr Anh Nguyen Austen and Dr Mary Tomsic work at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University.